EoL is a slightly flawed mechanic in anything but a constant heal situation.

for garalon hc its great, but i still believe disc is better. the only fight where i feel its performs 100% is on tsulong. constant dmg in the night phase, constant healing in the day phase. but even so i still get bigger "numbers" as disc.

im not saying im better than you its just one fight that i notice we both ranked on. as a side note i end most fights on 50%+ mana, even with reforging down to under 10k spirit, but that is more a comment on the regen mehcanic of rapture.

for oh shit moments, Hymn is freaking awesome. that is one definate item that i miss. maybe devs will re-introduce it in the same form it was (ie 1/2 the power on a longer CD ala DS) or we can live in hope atleast

Our mastery as holy would be better off if the hot was faster. Considering other classes mastery (especially paladins) very rarely goes unused I think it wouldnt be too OP to reduce EoL ticks by a second or two.

EoL is a slightly flawed mechanic in anything but a constant heal situation.

for garalon hc its great, but i still believe disc is better. the only fight where i feel its performs 100% is on tsulong. constant dmg in the night phase, constant healing in the day phase. but even so i still get bigger "numbers" as disc.

im not saying im better than you its just one fight that i notice we both ranked on. as a side note i end most fights on 50%+ mana, even with reforging down to under 10k spirit, but that is more a comment on the regen mehcanic of rapture.

for oh shit moments, Hymn is freaking awesome. that is one definate item that i miss. maybe devs will re-introduce it in the same form it was (ie 1/2 the power on a longer CD ala DS) or we can live in hope atleast

Fair enough. Are you two healing or three healing? The reason I don't go disc on that is because we three heal.

---------- Post added 2013-02-12 at 03:26 PM ----------

Also, check my logs of heroic gara Hal from last night. I made it a point to play holy on our heroic kills simply to show that holy is more then capable on fights that people said its not earlier in this thread

as a side note i end most fights on 50%+ mana, even with reforging down to under 10k spirit, but that is more a comment on the regen mehcanic of rapture.

Holy regen honestly is just as good as disc, holy is about selective casting and you shouldn't be *spamming* a lot of holy priests that have rediculous amounts of over healing usually are the spammers with mana problems.

Also, disc regen has always been OP, which is why it's getting more normalized next tier.

Also, the argument of "EoL being a lot of overhealing" Yes, in some cases true, but disc has just as much overhealing at times via Divine Aegis, however you don't see the overhealing from aegis because it's an *absorb* and doesn't count towards *un effective overhealing*

If meters tracked how much DA is NOT absorbed I think you might be surprised.

Also, the argument of "EoL being a lot of overhealing" Yes, in some cases true, but disc has just as much overhealing at times via Divine Aegis, however you don't see the overhealing from aegis because it's an *absorb* and doesn't count towards *un effective overhealing*

If meters tracked how much DA is NOT absorbed I think you might be surprised.

Disc will continue to be strong on any '1 minute' fight, like Blade Lord, where having a CD like Spirit shell available can really trivialize an encounter. Yes, Spirit Shell was nerfed, but not THAT badly as some of you make it sound.

Here's the way I've always felt the two specs differ.
Disc - Consistant HPS. Disc can pump out raw numbers at a constant pace, can provide buffers in the event of emergency (Shields/SShell)
Holy - Slightly inconsistant HPS, but can rock the burst. Holy is fairly unique in that it can really throttle it's HPS, with the shear number of spells it has. (BHx2 PoH spam is gonna be sexy with the new glyph, but my manars T_T)

Both have powerful selection, it's just really based on what you need. Also, IMO Holy is better for healing on the move.

I really dislike EoL. Wish they would put a Wild Growth treatment on it, more upfront healing. Hate that EoL is so easily sniped, which most other healers do not have to deal with. It's not really that DA vs EoL does more over healing, it's DA vs EoL who has control over the over healing. In DA's case, wasted DA is generally the Priests fault. Why were you PoH spamming when no damage was coming (yea yea RNG too), where EoL is like "Yea , got a nice EoL oh... the pally healed everyone... thx..."

I'm going to have to completely disagree with you about Holy being able to heal any fight equally as well as disc. I go Holy for all of two fights this tier, heroic Garalon and Tsulong (I could feasibly go Holy for heroic WotE too, but disc works better with our setup). If the fight doesn't have low raidwide damage where you can abuse Holy's mastery (or yellow chackra/renew/heal spam if that's your thing), Holy just doesn't do well. And I'm not comparing Holy with Disc when I say this, I'm comparing them to all specs in the game aside from Resto Druids (who sadly don't have the output to keep up roght now). It's not that Holy doesn't have throughput... They have great throughput. It's that they don't have SUSTAINABLE throughput over the course of fights that don't have low, constant raidwide damage.

Your reply is poorly worded. Holy has great and sustainable throughput. What it does lack is highly concentrated burst for those fights, which are very spiky like blade lord, windlord and empress.

Otherwise holy both on 10man and 25man is reasonably close to paladins, shamans and monks overall. Some fights its ahead and a few more fights its below, but that all has to do with encounter mechanics.

As for the requirement for low damage I can't disagree more. Holy is just as powerfull when the boss is throwing the kitchen sink at your raid. Garalon hc is probably the heaviest raid damage in the tier and holy is doing really well there. In the majority of the current content holy performs at roughly the same level as monks and shamans at least in terms of healing, particularly on 25man. There are only a handfull of logs available for holy priests on protectors hard and the top one from method I see a holy priest performing at the same level as a monk. I pressume the method monk is not really a slacker: http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...e=7997#Isheria

For the rest of the instance, lei shi is a fight where holy does not do that well, but on sha of fear paladins and disc are the top as expected and holy is the best of the rest.

The main reason why you don't see many more highly ranked holy priests is because disc performs better on the logs, even though it is not really more powerful.

The fact that holy mastery get sniped a lot and holy has a rather shallow burst does not make the spec unable to heal well nor does it mean it lacks healing power. There is absolutely NO fight in the entire 25man tier, where being holy means that you are depriving your raid of healing throughput. There is only a handful of fights where the disc absorbs are such a big advantage for survival that it does not make any sense for a prioest to be holy.

Holy is able to heal almost every fight as well as disc, when you consider however that its very susceptible to overheal, heal sniping and that its burst is end-loaded rather than front loaded you can see that it might not do as well on the meters as disc. That does not mean it can't heal the fight equally well, it just means its heals are getting sniped, where disc is usually the one doing the sniping.

The only thing that matters for your ability to heal the fight is throughput. Holy has that in spades. In fact after the disc and monk nerfs in 5.2 holy is going to be top dog along with resto shammies for throughput.

However on 10man hc, disc has a distinct advantage in that it can actually contribute meaningfull dps, especially since so many bosses on hc have damage buffs for atonement. Aside from that in terms of healing power holy is every bit as good as disc and in some fights its actually better. In the vast majority of cases you can be holy without your raid being affected even in the slightest, the other healers will just snipe your heals instead of you sniping theirs as disc. That is all.

After swimming though the first few pages, which contained a big mud throwing waddle, I finally arrived at end page, believing that hte last pages at least had some information, though most of it is 5.1-centric, how are the two specs compared to each other?

Just for background I have always played Disc (or in the old days Disc/holy hybrids), ever since it was possible to play full disc in PvE, I have played that spec, regardless of output performance, differences, and nerfs/buffs. I love the play style - Proactive healing, combined with a high ability to prevent unreal amounts of damage for a short amount of time, at high cost to mana - love it.

So for me this conversation has been about; figuring out, if Holy is returning to the board as a viable spec, and more so if Disc will loose a lot of it's glamour with the changes to some of its mechanics.

What are the nerf-inpact on disc for 5.2. Will it leave me struggling, or will it just be like it has always been, the same with a slight feeling of being inferior or forced output/throughput.

I personally think that the shielding mechanism suits me best, Discs' has proactive healing which feels more like me, rather than holys' - reactive healing.

But will Patch 5.2 make me feel a lot more like reactive healing as disc?

Will disc have to reforge away from Haste/Mastery or Haste/Crit, and go Haste/Crit instead?

What will Holy bring now, that makes it more viable than before? (or is all the holy-hype only valid because Disc will be slowed down?)

My Own experience with Holy was that it fell hard behind in Reactive Healing, both behind Paladins and Shamans (and partly Monks) but I haven't played Holy with any of the Tier Set-bonuses, so I wouldn't know.

We have a priest in the guild who loves Holy, and plays it very well, but he gets r.... by the other healers, and he feels that he's forced to re-roll Disc or Another healer, to be able to play well - will this feeling go away? (he has played holy ever since TBC, in vanilla he played the same Disc/holy hybrids we all played back then).

It is pretty odd that Ghostcrawler's idea of Holy Priests is that they are Molten Core era healers (aka, first tier of Vanilla wow era, before the devs had any real knowledge about how raids would play out) - except - before the fight they pre-buff a Chakra relevant to their healing role / fight mechanics. So Holy has never evolved to him, spare that it has a second Inner Will/Inner Fire system? Yikes.

I don't agree with that at all, Holy has come a long way since then - but that the lead developer is apparently oblivious to that is pretty odd.

It is pretty odd that Ghostcrawler's idea of Holy Priests is that they are Molten Core era healers (aka, first tier of Vanilla wow era, before the devs had any real knowledge about how raids would play out) - except - before the fight they pre-buff a Chakra relevant to their healing role / fight mechanics. So Holy has never evolved to him, spare that it has a second Inner Will/Inner Fire system? Yikes.

I don't agree with that at all, Holy has come a long way since then - but that the lead developer is apparently oblivious to that is pretty odd.

It's more like they push Holy into monotonous playstyle with Chakra, thus making it more like Vanilla than BC/WotLK.

I posted a thread with the full extent of the nerf somewhere, but here is hte gist of it.

PoH has been nerfed back to slightly less than what it was at the start of pandaria without aegis assuming you drop all mastery.

PWS takes a hit of ~10-15%, so despite the buffs it received its back to the start of MoP

Spirit shell is nerfed to 80% of what it was at the start of pandaria for PoH and its back to what it was in the late beta for single target heals

You will see at least a 30% nerf to total PoH output and an 80% reduction in the absorb you can stack without spirit shell. You will see a 30-40% reduction in your ability to stack absorbs with spirit shell.

Mastery is now is now a useless stat. Even with high crit and 0 mastery rating it is 3-4 times less useful than crit and haste. You want to have zero mastery rating as currently mastery is as useful as nipples on a breastplate if you know what I mean.

The total extent of the nerf is that you are now unable to build any significant damage buffer unless you have spirit shell up. The change means that healing strong aoe damage now PoH is your last priority. Penance and solace (via atonement), PoM, cascade/star and glyphed binding heals are now your priorities and PoH is your weak and inefficient filler. PWS needs to be used when you can chain several spells and a cast into borrowed time or if you can't for rapture only. Weak aoe damage is best healed via atonement. If the fight has a lot of hard aoe, every healer will leave you in the dust. Atonement fights and bursty fights you are probably ok on 10man

After swimming though the first few pages, which contained a big mud throwing waddle, I finally arrived at end page, believing that hte last pages at least had some information, though most of it is 5.1-centric, how are the two specs compared to each other?

Just for background I have always played Disc (or in the old days Disc/holy hybrids), ever since it was possible to play full disc in PvE, I have played that spec, regardless of output performance, differences, and nerfs/buffs. I love the play style - Proactive healing, combined with a high ability to prevent unreal amounts of damage for a short amount of time, at high cost to mana - love it.

So for me this conversation has been about; figuring out, if Holy is returning to the board as a viable spec, and more so if Disc will loose a lot of it's glamour with the changes to some of its mechanics.

What are the nerf-inpact on disc for 5.2. Will it leave me struggling, or will it just be like it has always been, the same with a slight feeling of being inferior or forced output/throughput.

I personally think that the shielding mechanism suits me best, Discs' has proactive healing which feels more like me, rather than holys' - reactive healing.

But will Patch 5.2 make me feel a lot more like reactive healing as disc?

Will disc have to reforge away from Haste/Mastery or Haste/Crit, and go Haste/Crit instead?

What will Holy bring now, that makes it more viable than before? (or is all the holy-hype only valid because Disc will be slowed down?)

My Own experience with Holy was that it fell hard behind in Reactive Healing, both behind Paladins and Shamans (and partly Monks) but I haven't played Holy with any of the Tier Set-bonuses, so I wouldn't know.

We have a priest in the guild who loves Holy, and plays it very well, but he gets r.... by the other healers, and he feels that he's forced to re-roll Disc or Another healer, to be able to play well - will this feeling go away? (he has played holy ever since TBC, in vanilla he played the same Disc/holy hybrids we all played back then).

(Tallens'out)

To me, Blizzard should have never introduced disc as the pure proactive spec. Its unfair, its a huge advantage over the other healers, and its unbalanced, nor can ever be fully balanced. Think of a dps that can pro-dps the boss for a huge amount before the pull, and when the pull comes the boss suddenly takes a huge chunk of damage. This dps class will be at a huge advantage and everyone else will have to play catchup, but luckily this concept does not exist for dps (at least not in a serious way), and I can't imagine why it exists on healing.

Now, don't get me wrong. I am not against disc as a spec, and I do think there is room for absorbs, but I also think Blizzard needs to decide if disc is healing spec in the true sense of the word, or a preventer/supporter, a role we don't have in WoW. A class that uses mitigation cds or single target abilites to help the group - that's fine. A class that uses nearly all of its healing toward OP abilities to mitigate, and rarely does "old fashion" healing, that's not fine. Ignoring boss mechanics alltogether does not make the group better, I think it makes it worse, as it allows for a bit more slacking. Attonment doesn't help - its another unfair mechanic. Again, not in its idea, which is good, but I can't think of another spec that can be close to the top dps and top healing at once - its just unfair. Attonment is fine as an idea, but I think Blizzard should make the choice - high dps and low healing or low dps and high healing. As it is now, its helping many groups passing enrage timer, which again, does not improve that group, it makes the group worse. Instead of the common lock or rogue or whatever class working to squeeze more dps, reforge a bit better, time things a bit better, etc. they can rely on the disc priest for filling up the damage they don't need to do.

I totally feel disc should be a strong and unique healer. I do feel absorbs have their place, but it seems to me Blizzard doesn't really know where to take the spec and how to evolve it. Spirit Shell always looked to me like "just give them an OP ability" solution more than maybe reworking and redesigning some of the *healing* aspects of the spec, the ones it lacks the most. If you forget PW:S and attonement for a second, what does disc have? Penance, PoH, and GH. They are rarely using Renew or FH in their rotation. I think that's the place Blizzard needed to improve the spec, make it more of what it presents itsef as - a healer.

Now, I know what you'll say - disc will lose its uniqueness this way and will feel too similar to holy. But no, it won't, because it will still have attonment and absorbs, just as niche to help the group, its going to up disc's charm imo.

If it does retain absorbs in its current way (which seems like the direction Blizzard is taking), they should at least design most boss fights to not center around the abilities of one healer - like HoF for example. HoF was pretty much THE raid for disc priests, but many other healers didn't get a chance to shine at all this tier. Blizzard should create situations where Healing > Absorbs. Why would anyone take a holy priest (or druid, or monk) over disc at any point in tier 14, except for situations like that? (which is pretty much only Tsulong, and you can maybe argue for Garalon).

I also think Blizzard should rework some healers mastery. Holy pallies mastery is too strong, and almost never goes to waste. Echo Of Light is a joke in most fights in the amount of overhelaing it does, and so forth. But that's a bit off topic.

To me, Blizzard should have never introduced disc as the pure proactive spec. Its unfair, its a huge advantage over the other healers, and its unbalanced, nor can ever be fully balanced.

TL: DR it all properly but, I think you are grossly oversimplifying and overblowing the importance of the available absorbtions. Not only can they easily be completely wasted when used wrong, they can also be extremely expensive and they all carry an cd or debuff which means that there is no way you can prevent close to all damage with absorbtions if you are doing any real challenge. Sure there are times where throwing a shield on everyone before a big aoe is very helpful, but it cannot be equalized to someone healing freely before the boss has even started doing damage. The shields cant be used that freely. That is not to say that they arent useful, but they arent even close to making the other healers obsolete. If anything having two disc priests in the same raid will lead to them causing some trouble for each other.

The fact that disc has SS is thought out I think, disc is not the most effective healing specc when it comes to pure healing and it makes up for that by having unique spells used in certain situations and smart atonement healing. While SS could be toned down a bit, removing it would leave a gap needed to be filled with something else.

In addition there can never be completely balanced classes and speccs because the fact that they are diffrent inherently makes them unbalanced. Healing classes and speccs are good at diffrent things. The fact that some specc have more smart heals than others, some have cheaper/free heals, some have much more healing per second single target/aoe a.s.o. all make them good at diffrent things and it also gives them an unfair advantage in certain situations.

TL: DR it all properly but, I think you are grossly oversimplifying and overblowing the importance of the available absorbtions. Not only can they easily be completely wasted when used wrong, they can also be extremely expensive and they all carry an cd or debuff which means that there is no way you can prevent close to all damage with absorbtions if you are doing any real challenge. Sure there are times where throwing a shield on everyone before a big aoe is very helpful, but it cannot be equalized to someone healing freely before the boss has even started doing damage. The shields cant be used that freely. That is not to say that they arent useful, but they arent even close to making the other healers obsolete. If anything having two disc priests in the same raid will lead to them causing some trouble for each other.

And still, guilds are stacking disc priests, and we see progression guilds running with more than one disc priest (in 10m as well). So while they can cause problems for each other, it only happens if they're bad and don't communicate. In this tier, absorbs were better than healing, simple as that. Its all over WoL, I've even heard jokes about bringing resto shammies just to get their totem up for disc's rapture. Yes, the reality was that many healers were healing the leftovers but the big chunks of damage were absorbed by disc priests or healed via attonment.

Originally Posted by Findulidas

The fact that disc has SS is thought out I think, disc is not the most effective healing specc when it comes to pure healing and it makes up for that by having unique spells used in certain situations and smart atonement healing. While SS could be toned down a bit, removing it would leave a gap needed to be filled with something else.

I think I said it but I'll say again, I'm all for balancing disc priests healing. I think its about time they recieve a truly unique way of healing (especially AoE, single target they are doing well). If you take aside how OP SS is, at its core its not a thrilling concept. There are plenty of great disc priests who came up with some pretty cool ideas of how to make disc's healing both more appealing and more effecient. Its just seems like a cheap, lazy solution that Blizzard came up with rather than truly putting serious thought into the spec and work on it.

Originally Posted by Findulidas

In addition there can never be completely balanced classes and speccs because the fact that they are diffrent inherently makes them unbalanced. Healing classes and speccs are good at diffrent things. The fact that some specc have more smart heals than others, some have cheaper/free heals, some have much more healing per second single target/aoe a.s.o. all make them good at diffrent things and it also gives them an unfair advantage in certain situations.

You're right, but things can very well be more balanced than they are now. Some fights needs to favor some healers over the others, but all healers should be viable. What we got instead is a whole tier favoring one spec (some might argue pallies as well) over pretty much all other classes. Again, WoL tells the story way better than any of us can. Raidbots approves it as well. The classes who suffered the most are the raw healing classes who offer little utility and none of them dominated throughput as well - I just find it odd. Now, as you say, they are good at different things, so wouldn't that make them good for different fights as well? But see...this isn't the case. Disc is better than all/most at pretty much everything - throughput, utility, absorbs, healing via dps, mana regen. Holy priests were pretty much dead for an entire tier, especially for heroic progression. Druids aren't doing so hot either. Monks did at first but quickly got nerfed and declined. Shammies are lucky to have solid utility, and Pallies and Discs are just better than everyone at just about everything. Everything? Well...no - they aren't better at AoE on the move, which makes other healers viable for what...2 fights out of 16? Incredible balance there.

I've said this over and over...while Pallies were doing a bit OP in DS, I still think DS was a good model for healers balance, and priests were really enjoying this. Holy wasn't forced to respec disc, despite being worse at fights like Morchok, Zonozz. Disc wasn't forced to respec holy, despite being worse at Hagara, Spine. Everyone was happy. Funny to say that while DS was a much worse raid than MsV and HoF, I enjoyed it a lot more overall - simply due to this fact.

The obsession with using WoL as proof is futile. People respecced to Disc by the droves in order to take advantage of Discs...well, advantages. Holy was shoved under the rug since it couldn't completely negate mechanics like disc could. But to believe these fights weren't/aren't doable without a disc priest is total folly.